PRESS RELEASE 12/19/2016, ICA Commission on Planetary Cartography
The new map showing the New Horizons encounter hemispheres of Pluto and Charon is a result of the cooperation between the worlds of planetary science, cartography and arts.
It is the 7th map in the series of multilingual maps of planets and moons for children.
The map shows the geology of the surface together with characters taken from the informal nomenclature.
The map of the double planet, the larger named after Pluto, the god of the underworld; and the smaller after Charon, the ferryman between the worlds of the living and the dead, has the theme of the Halloween.
A specialty of this map compared to other, “scientific” maps is that keeping cartographic accuracy, it links arts and science, and visualizes features in a way that is easier to interpret for the non-scientists.
The map premiered at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco last week.
The map is joint effort of graphic artist Adrienn Gyöngyösi and scientists working at NASA and SETI Institute (Henrik Hargitai, editor; and Ross Beyer who contributed with the text describing Pluto).
This nonprofit project is supported by the International Cartographic Association.
The map is free to download.
Contact: henrik.i.hargitai//at//nasa.gov
Planetary maps for children 